How to Speed Up Your Startup

Nor is Weintraut impressed by startups that commit what he considers to be one of the cardinal sins of fast hiring: recruiting junior people now, with the expectation that you'll fill the senior positions later. His reasoning: Bringing in one untried contributor doesn't increase the number of people who can hire other people, whereas bringing in a more-senior player adds to the number of people who can recruit for your company. "Hire high," says Weintraut, "and hire the hirers. Your first job is to hire people magnets -- people who are seen as leaders by their peers."

Of course, that's easier said than done. Weintraut estimates that in the past few years, the number of startups has increased fourfold, while the pool of top people available to work at those startups has only doubled. "Pitching to venture capitalists is trivial," he tells company founders who visit him. "The hardest thing that you'll encounter is pitching to a potential vice president of engineering."

One simple way to tell how fast you're moving on the recruiting front is to ask yourself a question: How many job interviews are you conducting today? By Weintraut's calculations, a successful Internet startup will grow from 2 to 100 people within a year. Since you'll probably have to interview about 5 people for each person you hire, you should be conducting 500 interviews a year -- or, almost 2 interviews a day. If you're not, then you're falling behind already.

Another secret to speed is simplicity. For an Internet company, the key to outcompeting a gaggle of well-funded rivals is to present a product or service that is so distinctive and so compelling that customers are quick to recognize its superiority. That doesn't mean that you should load your offering with lots of features and options. Quite the opposite. Less is more, argues Weintraut: "Instead of having a product that's full of features -- Microsoft-style software -- offer a service with one key feature. Simple equals fast. What is the one feature that the largest number of customers will find immediate, obvious, and useful?"

When.com, one of Weintraut's fastest success stories, is a case in point. The company started out with a grand plan that would essentially re-create Microsoft Outlook on the Web. But realizing that such a complex technical endeavor would take too much time, When.com changed its strategy -- by embracing simplicity. Instead of focusing on a broad technical vision, it offered something very basic: a calendar. The company then cut deals with more than 50 content providers to include event information on its calendar. That shift in focus radically shortened development time. "In one day," explains Weintraut, "we could sign a business-development agreement with, say, the Weather Channel or a local newspaper, and fill a calendar with that client's information, whereas developing a new feature on the calendar could have taken months."

The decision to do less technically in order to go faster also enhanced another objective: It made the calendar immediately useful to users. By gathering event content from many sources, When.com provided an obvious benefit to large numbers of people. "Benefits to customers are the only barriers to entry," says Weintraut. Indeed, Weintraut discourages his companies (including When.com) from trying to lock in exclusive relationships with partners in an attempt to erect barriers against competitors. "We live in a customer-centric world," he says. "The only thing that customers care about is how something will benefit them." And forget about hiring lawyers to protect your ideas. You're better off moving quickly to the next idea. "If you're not afraid that Yahoo! will copy what you're doing, then it's probably not worth doing," Weintraut quips.

There's one more core competence for fast startups: They must pick fast partners. Sure, in a world powered by the Web, partnerships are a crucial asset for success. And there's a strong temptation -- especially for startups, which are eager for credentials and credibility -- to partner early on with big-name firms that sound impressive to potential customers and to the media. But that's almost always a mistake, says Weintraut. "Even if those companies are going to be your best customers, they won't move fast enough," he argues. "Remember, you've got four months to get to market. It's probably going to take four months for a big company's lawyers even to consider your initial proposal."

So what's the alternative? Get up and running now; seek big-name partners later. When a fledgling When.com first began courting big portal companies -- Netscape, Yahoo!, and the like -- they didn't take serious notice. It wasn't until When.com had created its calendar site, signed up hundreds of content partners, and launched a service with obvious benefits to customers that the big companies began to show interest. "The best thing that a startup can do is to go out and take control of its own destiny," Weintraut says. "Create a stand-alone business, and the partners will follow."